About

Robert Kurzban is a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. His research focuses on the nature of evolved cognitive adaptations for social life. These include processes involved with cooperative decision making, punishment, morality, close relationships, and mate choice. He uses methods drawn from experimental economics and cognitive psychology to study these processes.

Journal Articles

We bring together this interdisciplinary body of research and review the main theories that have been proposed to explain human prosociality, with an emphasis on kinship, reciprocity, indirect reciprocity, punishment, and morality.
— Annual Review of Psychology

By focusing on disputants' actions, bystanders can dynamically change which individuals they support across different disputes, simultaneously solving the problems of coordination and exploitation.
— Psychological Bulletin

We review empirical evidence regarding the operation of these systems, discuss the causes of cultural and individual differences in their outputs, and sketch their computational architecture.
— Behavioral and Brain Sciences